And All Her Yesterdays
by bethemoon
Summary: She just wants to be herself, once she finds out what that is. Renesmee metafic, part of my Mary 'verse. Renesmee goes to Harvard and catalogues her loves. PG.


**Title**: And All Her Yesterdays**  
Character**: Renesmee Cullen**  
Rating**: PG**  
Warnings**: ... nothing, really.**  
When**: Elaboration of a period during Going South.**  
Summary**: She just wants to be herself.**  
Disclaimer**: The Twilight books are not mine, and I am thankful.**  
Author's Note**: Part of my Mary 'verse. Set during Going South, before The One Unchanging Thing Is I. Renesmee in Harvard as she becomes Mary Blake and catalogues her loves.

She falls in love for the first time when she steps onto Harvard's campus. The names are all old and familiar, and she feels a shiver of excitement when she steps into the huge halls of Widener Library.

The paths are lined with trees on the way to administration, where she signs up for classes with names like Religion and Reason, and Science and Human Nature and Biology and Genetics and Development of Organisms.

It is not until she sees her roommate is setting up pictures of her family that she realizes she has brought so little here. A bed, a bookcase she has already filled with books, a laptop. Everything else she had figured she would simply buy as she needed it.

"Hello," she says to her roommate.

"Oh! You startled me." The girl spins around and smiles at her, wide and a little nervous. "I'm Abby Phillips. You're Mary Blake?"

"Yes," Mary Blake says, and cautiously sticks her hand out. Abby shakes it, a little surprised, and then says,

"You won't mind if I put music on, will you?"

"I've never had Sourpatch Kids," Mary admits, and Abby giggles.

"I eat them too much, they'll probably make me fat." Her laugh is infectious, and Mary can't help but laugh too.

She learns to call the Old Yard the quad, and lies on the grass and watches the sun pass overhead.

The second time she falls in love, it is a senior named John Smith, and she does not fall in love with him as much as she falls in love with the normality of his life - two parents, one sister, soccer games and debate club, days spent worrying if he would get into the college he wanted to go to.

They never make out, or go on a date, or even kiss. When he graduates, she shakes his hand and lets him go live his normal life.

She takes blood samples of herself and studies them under microscopes, learns the impossibility of her own existence in and out until it is written on her heart and in the neat meticulous notes she takes.

Jake comes to visit.

"I couldn't keep away," he says hoarsely, and he has bags under his eyes, his hands trembling as if he cannot control them.

"I'm happy here, Jake." She gestures at the buildings around her. "I'm not coming back." He doesn't say anything, stirs restlessly. "My wish is your command, remember?" she whispers, and cups her hand to the side of his face. "I want you to go and be happy without me." He blinks, once, twice, and then turns and walks away, very tall.

She closes her eyes, breathes _in_ and _out_ and wishes him well.

The thing is, she doesn't want perfection. She has never wanted perfection.

She just wants to be herself, once she finds out what that is.

The third time she falls in love, the boy's name is Daniel Nisi, and he is in her Metaphysics class. He stares at her until she snaps at him, and then one day he walks up to her and says all in a rush, "I'm really sorry about the staring and I was wondering would you like to go to the movies with me?"

She says yes, and they hold hands in the dim light, and laugh at all the right moments.

Eventually they go swimming at night in a lake, and go to a baseball game, and watch all seven seasons of Buffy when he finds out she's never watched it, and eat licorice while they talk about Plato and Aristotle. Their mouths are rimmed in black the first time they kiss.

They date for two years, and at the graduation ceremony he asks, "When will I see you next?" and she remembers anomalies and being different.

"Oh," she says, and tries not to cry when she says good-bye and good luck and holds hands with him one last time.

Later she opens his graduation gift to her and does cry. There is a box of licorice wrapped in the middle of the Harvard scarf. The card says, 'because you're always cold.'

She tries to catalogue the things she has learned to love - sourpatch kids, Abby singing along to Rihanna, John Smith, baseball games, licorice, Daniel Nisi, the Quad, Widener Library, Plato and Aristotle and Kant, metaphysics, biology, genetics, her own impossibility, holding hands and swimming in lakes at night, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, arguments about character motivation, the edge between awake and sleeping, kissing in the rain, sleepovers, watching all the Lord of the Rings movies in a row, so many things even her brilliant memory can't begin to list.

She cannot help but think that she knows more about love than her parents ever will.

She thinks, _my heart beats just like theirs_, but she could never fool herself.

The bus pulls in and she loops Daniel's scarf around her neck, crimson red and soft to the touch.

In the reflection in the bus window, her lips are rimmed in black.


End file.
